Word of the day

A reading from the Second Letter to the Corinthians
6:1-10

Brothers and sisters:
As your fellow workers, we appeal to you
not to receive the grace of God in vain.
For he says:

In an acceptable time I heard you,
and on the day of salvation I helped you.

Behold, now is a very acceptable time;
behold, now is the day of salvation.
We cause no one to stumble in anything,
in order that no fault may be found with our ministry;
on the contrary, in everything we commend ourselves
as ministers of God, through much endurance,
in afflictions, hardships, constraints,
beatings, imprisonments, riots,
labors, vigils, fasts;
by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness,
in the Holy Spirit, in unfeigned love, in truthful speech,
in the power of God;
with weapons of righteousness at the right and at the left;
through glory and dishonor, insult and praise.
We are treated as deceivers and yet are truthful;
as unrecognized and yet acknowledged;
as dying and behold we live;
as chastised and yet not put to death;
as sorrowful yet always rejoicing;
as poor yet enriching many;
as having nothing and yet possessing all things.

From the Gospel according to Matthew
5:38-42

Jesus said to his disciples:
"You have heard that it was said,
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.
When someone strikes you on your right cheek,
turn the other one to him as well.
If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic,
hand him your cloak as well.
Should anyone press you into service for one mile,
go with him for two miles.
Give to the one who asks of you,
and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow."

The Sermon on the Mount, as it is reported by Matthew, is the place in the New Testament where we see Jesus clearly affirming and decisively exercising the power over the Law that Israel received from God as the cornerstone of the covenant. [...]

The new law he brought has its synthesis in love. This love will make man overcome the classic friend-enemy opposition in his relations with others, and will tend from within hearts to translate into corresponding forms of social and political solidarity, even institutionalised. The irradiation of  Jesus “new commandment” will therefore be very broad in history.

At this moment, we would like above all to point out that in the important passages of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’, the contrast is repeated: "You have heard that it was said . . . But I say to you‘; and this is not in order to “abolish” the divine Law of the old covenant, but to indicate its ’perfect fulfilment", according to the meaning intended by God the Lawgiver, which Jesus illuminates with a new light and explains in all its fulfilling value of new life and generator of new history: and he does so by attributing to himself an authority that is that of God the Lawgiver. It can be said that in that expression repeated six times: I say to you, there resounds the echo of that self-definition of God, which Jesus also attributed to himself: ‘I am’. (St. John Paul II, General Audience, 14 October 1987)